2. The Power of Leverage & Unleash Your Passion
Create A Daily Practice
Why Do People Fail to Follow Through?
92% of the 17 million people that try to quit smoking each year fail.
95% of people who lose weight fail to keep it off long term.
88% of people who set New Year’s resolutions fail at their attempt.
Only 10% of the population has specific, well-defined goals, but even then,
seven out of the ten of those people reach their goals only 50% of the time.
Have you ever had the experience of helping someone work really hard to create a
change—lose twenty pounds, pay off their debts, or create a passionate love affair
with their spouse—only to find they lapsed back into their old behaviors within a short
period of time? Why do some people make changes that last long-term whereas others
have a hard time getting past the initial hurdles?
This transformation and creation of lasting change begins with a commitment to
constantly raise your own internal standards and a continual focus on improving the
quality of your life and others in every area: emotions, health, finances, relationships,
leadership, spirituality, contribution, and time management.
Leadership Academy provides a setting to offer this commitment to yourself and others
while teaching you the strategies sand tools necessary to achieve the ultimate success.
One useful tool that can be the single biggest roadblock in creating change is the
Power of Leverage!
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Anthony Robbins
3. Create A Daily Practice & The Power of Leverage
Unleash Your Passion
The Power of Leverage
Making Change a Must
Discovering the right leverage takes skill. You must understand what someone feels
they really need and what you can use to ‘bargain’ with them to move toward more
empowering actions.
Leverage is uncovering what’s most important to a person to help them make the
commitment to making a change. To ensure that change is lasting, the commitment has
to be overwhelming. It has to overcome the forces of inertia that hold our old behaviors
and beliefs in place.
One of the most important precepts about human behavior and change is that at the
most basic level, there are two forces that motivate people to do what they do: the
desire to avoid pain or the desire to gain pleasure. This principle is what causes the
‘yo-yo’ pattern in some people: they go back and forth between taking action to create
change and losing their drive to take any action at all.
Change is never a matter of ability, it’s a matter of motivation. If change is a “should,”
will people change? No. Change has to be not a should, but a MUST.
To access leverage, you must help someone associate massive PAIN to not changing
NOW, and massive PLEASURE to changing immediately. The motivation is based
on both pain AND pleasure. Pain is short-term motivation, but you need the pleasure
side for long-term motivation.
The truth is everyone in life has developed different strategies or patterns for getting
out of pain and into pleasure. Thus, if we want to create permanent and consistent
change, what we must do is develop a new set of patterns of how to get out of pain
and into pleasure. In other words, in order to create lasting change, we must use pain
to get people’s attention and motivate them to want to make the change, but then we
must link pleasure to the new pattern to make it last.
Anthony Robbins
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4. The Power of Leverage
The Process of Getting Leverage
3 Simple Steps to access leverage
Leadership Academy offers a variety of tools to access leverage. Most importantly
you want to begin looking for leverage by learning more about the person’s motive
and meaning in terms of the challenge. Leverage is created by asking questions and
watching physiology for cues—look for large and small clues. If one question doesn’t
work, try something else.
STEP 1: LISTEN AND WATCH
Listen and watch for what’s most important to them. What are their beliefs about life?
What is something that motivates them toward pleasure and away from pain? Learn
how they make decisions and what’s most important in their world.
STEP 2: ASK & ASSOCIATE
Ask 3 kinds of questions:
1. Pain-associating questions:
• “What will this cost you?”
• “What has it cost you in the past?”
• “What is it costing the people you love?”
• “What is it costing you in (vehicle—work, family, etc.)?”
2. Questions that demonstrate inconsistency with what’s important to them:
• “How does smoking keep you from being close to your family?”
• “Is a leader of people so undisciplined as to need to sneak off to grab a
cigarette?”
• “How can smoking make you feel good when you tell me that your
company hasn’t promoted you because you smoke?”
3. Pleasure-associating questions:
• “If you change this now, how will your life be?”
• “What will you gain?”
• “What will it mean for the people you love?”
• “What will it give you?”
Step 3: Check
Ask questions to make sure they are emotionally associated to the massive, immediate
pain of not changing, and the massive, immediate pleasure of changing now.
If the commitment is not clear, go back to steps 1 and 2. Make sure you are using what’s
more important to them and not you.
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Anthony Robbins